I
A very old friend,
who learned the songs of the river and the stone,
told me to go to the quiet center
when the path had grown dark.
And I knew where it was:
a field and an old farmhouse, its porch
sagging like the elder's shoulders and
the smell of the last snows, giving up
their ghosts to the spring.
Yes, he said. That is the place.
Let your strangest thoughts
build their nests there.
II
So this is me, pulling on my boots,
stepping out of the warm kitchen
into the vast realm of things I do not understand.
I go out to see them, to see if I may bring them in
to nuzzle by the hearth.
I come to a pine where the shadows are still deep,
and I see the corpse of a fine doe.
The night’s dark work is done,
and she has already begun her long return,
the frost settling into her fur
like a burial shroud.
I have heard it said that the wise
do not weep for death.
Tell me, what is this wisdom wisdom
that dismisses the tragedy of a life
that was, only yesterday, warm?
What good is a heart
if it does not break,
a little,
at such a perfect and terrible stillness?
III
My gaze settles on a new growth tree,
thin-boned and desperate, fighting to rise
between the shoulders of the old pines.
When the long fight is over, what of me will be grieved?
Perhaps my fast feet,
carrying a warning through dark mountain evenings.
Or maybe it will be my open hand,
allergic to excess.
There is a brew I sometimes make from lust and admiration;
and some may miss the taste.
But others say there will be little to grieve,
as very little dies;
the soul slips out of the body
like a threadbare coat,
gone to buy a new one from the tailor.
Perhaps I am a garment,
though I'd rather be a wardrobe.
Inside of this collection hangs all the lives I've known:
my father’s tucked-in t-shirts,
a black cocktail dress,
a wool jumper for Sunday morning.
Maybe I can gift these clothes before I go.
IV
A shadow falls over me, and I see a hawk;
its eye is a map of hunger.
How does such a self choose to dissolve?
As a puppet on a machine some have said,
ceding all things to karmic control.
A part of me recoils at the thought of machines,
Hacking, slashing, burning.
Instead, let me fall to these woods.
Let hunger and teeth discover me there.
Let my ribs spring open like a burst seedpod,
my heart's chamber plundered by a weasel's urgent need.
The coyote, the bear, the fox,
let each one carry their portion.
Let the bobcat's teeth score my bones,
leaving their calligraphy for the moss to trace.
Let my marrow be sucked clean
by the smallest mouths.
But I surrender love to no machine,
karmic or otherwise.
V
I follow the narrow path of trampled leaves,
where the hemlocks lean in to listen.
The cold water is talking to itself over the stones.
I pick one, and spend a moment to know it.
Two skips on the skin of the water, then a third, faltering.
Then, gone beneath the crisp surface.
Some speak of this, saying that the brief work of the arm is all you can own.
The ripples, the rings of light, what happens after,
that belongs to the world.
And this is the only instruction that matters.
Do the work.
And then, let go.
VI
Finally, the great stone,
left here by the ice ten thousand years ago.
It does not need a name, and it has never been lonely.
But I am delicious in my specificity.
When I am swallowed back into the universe,
no matter how in some other way I might endure,
I will be dispersed and segmented.
This self might be a garment to be discarded by time,
but it was sewn for me by my father’s patience,
my mother’s worry.
My lover's words embroider the hem.
This is the thing I still don’t know:
which is the work?
To kill the ego on the alter of enlightenment?
or to honor this garment even as I know
the universe will unravel it before long.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don’t know.
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